Monday, August 8, 2011

Light Our Darkest Hour

It's time to announce the next movie project. The last one came about by chance, more or less. I happened to have a large chunk of time open up on my weekly schedule with nothing to fill it in the same week that Rotten Tomatoes released their list. I had only seen three. If it had been fifteen or fifty, I don't know that I would have taken on the movies, but I hadn't and I did. I enjoyed having the goal, so with the "Worst of the Worst" finished, I wanted to take on another one. This one is much, much more stupid.

Which is the best movie based on a cartoon based on an action figure? The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie stunk and the cartoon was originally based on a comic book, anyway. The recent G.I. Joe movie was awful. It certainly wasn't Care Bears: The Movie or anything with the Go-Bots. No, it was the non-KMart version of the Go-Bots (clip from Clerks II not available on-line), the Transformers. And it wasn't the Michael Bay crapfest, of course. We're talking about the 1986 cartoon, complete with one curse word and the voice talents of Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, and Robert Stack. Yes, it was Orson Welles' last movie. I've seen it a dozen times, at least. I think I saw it multiple times in the theater and they showed it on TV as part of the show and I owned at least one copy of it on VHS. In 2006, a special edition was released on DVD and I bought it.

And found out my wife had never seen it.

I was perplexed and horrified. Somehow, she had never seen this seminal movie of my childhood. I had to set that straight, so I insisted she watch the movie with me, but she refused. She claimed that I make her watch everything I like and rarely watch stuff she likes (and I type this sentence while the TV is showing True Blood, which I don't get at all). She told me that the only way she would ever watch the great Transformers: The Movie is if I watched every one of her DVDs that I had not seen. It's only eleven, not anywhere close to the ninety-seven I watched for the last project, and they're not all bad movies. So it will take me much less time than the twenty-two months the last list took me -- it also helps that I have all of the DVDs and don't have to rely on sending them back and forth to Netflix -- but I am still not super-excited about watching these. Eleven movies and I made no promises to my wife that I would not completely savage them, so I expect to do just that. Hope you enjoy it more than I do, which I won't, probably.

The only one I've seen is "The Hours," which is actually really good. Maybe save that one for the darkest part of the darkest hour, when you're not sure you can make it through. You know, when you've just endured a Jane Austen mini-series :)